The Music of Chance
When a novel's main character introduces himself by announcing that his life is over and he's crawling under a shady porch to die - or at least to convalesce in peace - experienced readers can sense what's coming, roughly. They know that last chapters placed first are really prefaces and that, soon, some supporting player (or group of them) will interrupt the wan protagonist's solitude and spin him around so he's facing life again. Facing life in the manner that he might face it if he could live it over again, which he finally sees that he can't, which changes him. The hero of "The Brooklyn Follies," Paul Auster's new novel, is a perfect candidate for this old story line. (Call it "the Hospice Plot.") Nathan Glass, a cancer survivor, is a retired life insurance agent, divorced, alone, alienated from his family and financially self-sufficient. The innovation here, the tricky part, is that he understands the hospice plot and how to write himself into it. By postmodern happenstance, Nathan, who's just transplanted himself to Brooklyn, is working on a book not unlike Auster's. Its theme is human foolishness, too, and it draws on Nathan's and others' experiences, including the experiences that flow from his decision to reflect full time. He's clever. He realizes that composing a memoir can magically attract the future.
"Imagine my surprise," says Nathan, whose self-taught literary style is faintly Victorian and overstuffed, as befits a late-middle-aged corporate drudge turned bard, "when I walked into Brightman's Attic that Tuesday morning in May and saw my nephew sitting behind the front counter, doling out change to a customer." Then Nathan adds: "Luckily, I saw Tom before he saw me." But there's nothing surprising or lucky here at all, of course. Amateurish novels and classic bedtime stories always proceed this way, through foreseeably unforeseeable accidents and heavily foreshadowed chance meetings.
Auster, who once called a novel "The Music of Chance" and used to play the human Uncertainty Principle for spooky atonal up-to-date effects, has chosen this time to sing a simpler tune that would seem to be beneath him, intellectually. This must be for a purpose, or several of them, and the novel's weird time frame hints at the most obvious one: to soften us up with olden-days orthodoxies so that he can subvert them in the end. Polite reviewers shouldn't reveal this ending but alert readers will anticipate it when they notice that the story runs - for no discernible reason, it first appears, because little that happens during its course couldn't happen in much the same way now - from the could-be-anytime spring of 2000 toward the once-in-a-lifetime New York City autumn of. . . .
But back to the conventional hospice plot. Nathan, though frail, is quite an extrovert, ready to chat up any stranger he meets and pursue the relationship all the way to doomsday should the stranger chat back. Because he's on a mission to court fate, oddballs with secrets appeal to him the most, like a rare book dealer named Harry Brightman, the jaunty gay employer of oddball Tom, Nathan's abruptly no-longer long lost nephew. Tom dropped from sight a few years earlier as a brilliant grad student in literature and Nathan, a thoroughly folkloric thinker, knows from the moment he bumps back into him that he's found a cabinmate on fate's Ship of Fools. He lets us know, too. Repeatedly. The journey's first leg is eaten up by port stops as Nathan, the scribbling collector of curious anecdotes, tells us everything but the very endings of the stories of everybody he comes across - and then urges these people, over long lunches and dinners, to favor him with yet more.
Auster's novel goes nowhere during all this dining, but Nathan's book of ironic downfalls grows fat. And it's a pleasure to be there at the table. The sinuous miniature fables are sporty good fun. Auster, who once did a stint on public radio as the host of something called the National Story Project, which solicited real-life yarns from listeners, has a highly developed ear for authentic-seeming farfetched narratives. As Nathan's and Tom's own big adventures take over the book, though, the strange-but-true digressions of the first half turn into something not-so-strange - and false. Beginning with the surprise arrival of an inscrutable, mute young female relative who's obviously fleeing something terrible (only the spirits can say what), the sense of destiny reaches a painful density. Nathan and Auster have packed their Chinese boxes so full of dizzying reversals, masked agents of fortune and other toys purchased from ye olde fiction shoppe that it's hard to feel delighted when one more grinning puppet springs forth from them, even if it's the largest puppet so far. This leaves Nathan no one to stimulate but Nathan. He's his own best audience, anyway, and one starts to feel that his treatise on human folly (which he ceaselessly alludes to but won't led us read until it's perfect, apparently) may have to be self-published. It will be if it has too many lines like these, inspired by a series of small mishaps in the countryside while he and Tom are driving the mystery girl to a new home where they hope she'll be well cared for: "There is no escape from the wretchedness that stalks the earth. Not even on the remotest hilltop in southern Vermont. Not even behind the locked doors and bolted porticoes of the make-believe sanctuary known as the Hotel Existence." This is a typical word-painting by Nathan, from the baroque solemnities ("stalks the earth") to the triple-brushstroke superlatives ("the remotest hilltop"). As for the Hotel Existence, it's an image from one of Nathan's earlier works that he's raised to the status of an icon.
When a good writer like Auster cedes story control to a bad writer like Nathan, it's often because the proxy's limitations make him expressive in some off-kilter way that's impossible for a professional. Sometimes fools speak more honestly than wise men, or perhaps they delude themselves more heartily, but whatever the reason for putting them in charge, they'd better be able to keep things moving. Ailing Nathan's shabby grandiloquence is charming at first because he's stretching his own capacities. The voice he comes up with may not be quite his own, but his pent-up need to speak excuses this. The man is at death's door, remember. He has a fundamental right to speak. But then he perks up. He dances out into the light. It's an elegant variation on the hospice plot: a man who's reawakened and redeemed by performing and recording his swan song. But that's when Nathan's singing starts to grate - when it turns to opera in his own ears and Auster doesn't pull him from the stage. He needs him there, and he needs him all puffed up, for the grand finale, it turns out. An incredibly loud finale, with lots of smoke.
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